Digital work time management and payroll

In production planning is with key importance, but in highly competitive market these companies tend to win who manage to balance well between pleasing clients that change their mind often and effective planning. CompuAccess work time management solution integrated with Columbus cloud salary programme helps Hilding Anders to achieve this balance.

HILDING ANDERS BALTIC Ltd is mostly known by the brand Sleepwell in Estonia and the Baltics – mattresses and beds are sold about 30.000 per year under this brand and on top of that private label production is offered for large customers. So quite probably you have also had a rest on one of Sleepwell mattresses or beds. This company belongs to the European largest mattress and bed production company Hilding Anders Group. High quality mattresses are produced due to good organisation culture, automated management processes and taking care of employees’ well-being. Luckily there are good tools that help to manage the processes effectively and eliminate human errors.

What makes the company special? Although it is a large group of companies it still has its own brand, Sleepwell, and the whole process is done by the company itself – from product development to sales and marketing. „This brand is very sweet for us,“ tells Carmen Froš, the HR manager of Sleepwell

As being part of a large group support is also received from the headquarters. About 80% of the orders come from there – in Estonia the mattress covers are produced from the beginning to the end, from the end of 2018 also cotton batting is produced here.  One can call the Estonian factory as the centre of know-how for sewing technology.

Although Hilding Andres Baltic is part of the large group and majority of the orders comes from there, then most of the management activities are still independent from the mother company and all the planning is done here. Probably so much freedom is given to the daughter company because of its good results, the employees have got courage to express their opinion and make well clarified proposals and the processes have been made very smooth during the years. In Estonia the company has been specially good in planning and several planners are also working for the group.

CompuAccess terminals are set close to the working stations. There are 10 terminals in Hilding Anders that allows the employees quickly register his/her tasks.

Two integrated programmes save real time

Hilding Anders Baltic Ltd uses Columbus cloud salary for payroll calculations and CompuAccess from Ektaco for planning tasks and time that guarantees smooth working process and eliminates the need for entering the data twice, helps to increase production effectiveness.

CompuAccess:

• Communicated automatically with the Columbus cloud salary programme and there is no need to insert the data twice. Synchronization and importing work automatically.
• With CompuAccess the data about real job done is gathered, incl. the information concrete tasks and locations.
• One can register easily with his/her electronic card or fingerprint. The terminals are durable and can also be used in case of minuses or a lot of dust.
• The system produces summary reports that give all relevant data for the managers.

Columbus cloud salary:

• The cloud salary programme includes personnel  administration and payroll calculation with strong business analytics functionality.
• The self-service environment makes the solution especially convenient as it allows to distribute the tasks wider inside the company.
• In addition e-government services and integrations with other existing programme give additional opportunities to it. 

The decision in favour of CompuAccess was made based on the production needs. Also prior to using CompuAccess and Columbus cloud salary the company has been using a digital work time registration with electronic cards. But that system allowed only to register the start and end times. But as there are over 300 employees in Hilding Anders Baltic with several departments and tasks it was important to understand where the employees really are and what concrete task are they doing.  „In reality it is not relevant for us as an employer, how long the person stays in the factory but how much work he/she gets done and by each concrete task “, comments Carmen.

With CompuAccess an employee will log himself/herself into the work station terminal with his/her card or fingerprint and can select the concrete tasks he/she starts to do. Each employee can choose if she or he wants to use the card or fingerprint. Hilding Anders uses the card to enter the doors as the fingerprint is not included in their access control system yet. Also the lunches, partly compensated by the company, are registered through the system. Using the card for paying for the lunch reduces the queues as the time for handling the cash or bank card payments is not needed. So the employees can enjoy lunch time, eating and chatting, the queues are minimal.

Some months of implementation start to bring back soon

It took about four months for Hilding Anders to implement CompuAccess and Columbus cloud payroll programmes including the negotiations time. By now the investment have been earned back fully.

In comparison to the time before these new programmes 11 team managers save daily at least half an hour of their working time. Previously each team manager had to create the working schedule for his/her team then now the scheduling works automatically. Concrete norm hours are connected with each employee in the system based on the employment contract and the system is compiling the schedule using this data. Previously the team managers had to deal with the problem when an employee had forgotten his/her card home or forgot to check in or out. Now there is no need to be a detective and the team leads can use the saved time for more reasonable tasks. In addition a big saving comes from the fact that the schedules and real working hours are now in the same system as the payroll calculations. The system does the needed comparisons by itself.

On the large screens one can always see the summary information about the present state of the production metrics. These are effectively used for the morning standups.

In addition to the concretely measurable saving of time in administration, the implementation has made usage of time by employees also much more effective. As the activities have been partly measured also before CompuAccess implementation then we got to know that previously we had we had about 13% of non-categorized working hours, in some months even 20%. This is the time about what we do not exactly know what the employees have been doing. By now this kind of time has diminished to 5%. This means that now we can plan production much better as we know more precisely how much time we need to plan for each different activity.

A bonus of CompuAccess is that each employee can also get his/her own report. For the salary calculations the report can be made with tasks done with the time it has taken. It also shows separately night time jobs, public holidays, etc. For production planning one can extract information about needed tasks and plan using this real life data.

Employees are welcoming the new solution

As Hilding Anders was using another work time registration system before implementing CompuAccess and Columbus cloud salary then registration of one’s working time wasn’t anything new to the employees. The new system has mainly got positive feedback – for example the employees value that they can send their own report to themselves via e-mail.

One type of salary in the company is so to say category payment – it is paid based on how many different tasks an employee is able to do –  for example, can he/she do just one operation, a couple or even all different tasks. As it is very important to react quickly to the client wishes then it is valuable to have employees whom you can shift from one task to another. The system allows now to check these kind of situations easily form the reports.

„In case of working with Ektaco it has been very valuable for us that they have been flexible. It is really important for us that our partner things along with us and is ready to analyse the specific topics – we do not wish for halfway solutions – we do it always 100%! Ektaco is supporting us a lot and we do not just get a standard solution but they get deeply in our needs and make needed additions. “

Feel free to read more about CompuAccess solution to Hilding Anders Baltic from here.